Island
by Ellie 5192
Summary: Sam's lonely. There is no sugar-coating, no being nice, no calling it by another name. She's lonely, plain and simple. And her one cure is gone. Perhaps forever. How do you deal with that? Continuum fic. S/J EST.


I haven't forgot my other fics, I'm just stuck. I'll get there, don't worry. My Mum likes this one- the only story of mine I've actually let her read. I hope you like it too.

Continuum fic. S/J established. One Shot.

Sam's lonely. There is no sugar-coating, no being nice, no calling it by another name. She's lonely, plain and simple. While she had come to realize just in time that Pete was not 'the one', there's no denying that there was a sense of security- or surety- in knowing there was someone else you were accountable to; someone else who depended on you coming home in one piece. She's military- she understands that she is accountable to the United States Air Force, that her team rely on her, and those of Earth occasionally depend on her and her mind.

But there is something else- something entirely different and unique- in sharing your life. It's a voluntary thing. And no matter how things went with Pete, or how things didn't really get going with Jack before everything changed, she misses them. Either of them. Both of them.

Or, perhaps, she misses the intimacy.

That surety. Her and Jack had only just begun to explore the possibilities. Fleeting visits, unsaid promises and a few stolen moments of bliss was as far as they got, what with them being a country apart.

She wants him to come home to her. To surprise her with a hug. Wants to smell his aftershave, so different from Pete's. But he's not here. If this is some kind of 'alternate reality', he's not hers to love. If they go back to their reality, he's dead. Both possibilities sting right through to her heart. And she doesn't even have her closest friends for help. Even those have been taken from her.

Sometimes she combats the loneliness in evermore-imaginative ways. She'll leave the light blinking on the answering machine so that the next day it will feel like someone else has tried to call. Or, perhaps more bizarre, she'll leaving things unfinished in the house, so that later she'll stumble across them and fool herself into thinking someone else is there with her. The newspaper and a half-drunk cup of coffee left on the table, or the toilet light left on, discovered hours later, makes her think that, maybe, someone else used it since the last time she did. She even once, in a moment of desperation, set the microwave on for twenty minutes. By the time it beeped, the buzzing had become white noise and she had, fleetingly, succeeded in making herself think there was someone other than herself in the house. That he was heating up left-over pizza, and was coming over to sit and watch this movie that he hated, just because he knew she loved it.

Music also helps- setting the radio onto a station she would normally pass over leads her to turn it off not long after with a grumble, convinced her annoying former-roommate turned it on in the first place. Which, of course, he didn't.

But the mother of all delusions is her habit of leaving the door unlocked. To come home and find her house open to the public makes her heart flutter, because somewhere in the back of her mind runs two possibilities. Either he's home- in their home- her one true wish. Or, he had just left the house and had again forgot to lock the front door, the ritual being so foreign to him. The fact that it stings again to find a blinking light on the answering machine and the coffee cup exactly where she left it is irrelevant- the inevitable pain of another lonely night is temporarily forgotten in that one moment. Sometimes she can even convince herself that the rise is worth the fall.

None of these measures are enough, though. Not really. Because, at the end of the day, she still crawls into her bed alone, wraps her arms around a pillow and tries desperately to convince herself that her bedding is his body. That the patch of warmth left by her leg was actually left by his. That through the sobs he's holding her, comforting her from a pain that his absence caused.


End file.
